Inventing Iraq – Yet Again?

by Joseph Stromberg

THE SETTING

Toby Dodge's Inventing
Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied1
(2003) constitutes a very interesting guide to the British period in Iraq -
or Mesopotamia, as it was then called. The period began, naturally enough, in
World War I. Like their counterparts in the Central Powers, British policymakers
were determined to maximize the gains that would flow from victory. Why such
ambitious planning is taken as decisive proof of gross immorality when done
by the Germans, but as common sense when done by the Brits, is anyone's guess.

In any case, anticipating big changes once Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their
ally the tottering Ottoman Empire were sufficiently softened up, British planners
devised a whole post-war New World Order,2 so to speak.

Central to British planning was oil. Wartime experience had raised fears of
imperial dependency on foreign-controlled oil supplies and, indeed, during the
war Britain had mainly gotten its oil from a single source – the United States.3 Now in position to liquidate the Ottomans' former assets,
the British stood to secure vast oil reserves they could control. Perhaps as
compensation for lost sales, they tried to con the Americans into taking Syria
as a League of Nations Mandate.

In the end, the US Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, leaving
the US out of Wilson's League of Nations, and the British could not foist Syria
off on America. Instead, they grudgingly let France have the mandate over
Syria.

In the old days, of course, British administrators would have simply
organized a likely set of former Ottoman territories into a colony with proper
frontiers and enough built-in ethnic rivalries to keep the "natives" from
unifying and throwing the foreign intruders out. Unfortunately, having helped
bring the US into the war for the Americans' bags of money, industrial might,
and (secondarily) manpower, they found themselves rhetorically trapped by
Woodrow Wilson's universalist ideas about collective security and other
high-minded claptrap. Of course this US "anti-imperialism" was the presentable
face of the Open Door policy of state-assisted American commercial
expansion.

Under the new Wilsonian rules, which involved open markets,
self-determination, and sovereignty for everyone (after a bit of training), the
British had to invent a sovereign "nation" of Iraq, but one whose rulers would
follow British orders, once the latter officially withdrew at the end of their
League mandate. In the all-important matter of oil, the British got the US
government and American oil interests to settle for a 25% share of the Iraqi oil
business.

British goals required a unified Iraq, consisting of Mosul (mostly Kurdish),
the Sunni center, and the Shiite south, all under a cooperative and pliable
regime. British policymakers in London, Cairo, and Delhi put forth competing
plans and theories of how best to bring such an Iraq about. They began studying
Iraqi society in the spirit of applied sociology to learn how best to achieve
this (Dodge, p. 13). Meanwhile, they managed to thwart attempts by the new
secular Turkish state to claim oil-rich Mosul.4

The first serious snag the British faced in Iraq was the massive tax revolt
of 1920-1921.5 In the interests of installing a "legitimate" regime,
they brought in from Syria the Hashemite sheik Faisal as king, along with his
council. In the end, what they managed to impose before they "left" in 1932
was a weak monarchy resting on a Sunni élite, whose tax collections were enforced,
up to that point, by British military power (Dodge, p. 31).

British withdrawal as an occupying power coincided with admission of the
Iraqi state to League membership, a badge of its alleged equal, international
sovereignty (p. 37).

In contrast with the current US adventure - so far anyway - the British had
been under constant financial pressure to withdraw as quickly as possible.
Neither Parliament nor the British taxpayer had much stomach for continued
presence in Mesopotamia (pp. 38 ff). The British state builders had to work
quickly and on a budget.

VISIONS OF ORDER

So how did British administrators undertake to
make a cooperative "modern" Iraqi nation-state? Here any number of inherited
British prejudices and ideological axes-for-grinding came into play. Thus, the
British assumed that Ottoman rule had involved the vilest Oriental Despotism,
in which corrupt effendis (landlords) and Ottoman-trained bureaucrats
based in the cities had oppressed the noble savages of the countryside (pp.
43-44). That the Arab Nationalist masses were found in cities was another mark
against the cities.

This meant that the sheiks were the key to a stable Iraq (p. 45). The task,
therefore, was to inspect Iraq sociologically, find out who the "natural
leaders" were, and delegate even more power to them as conduits of Iraqi state
(and therefore British) power. This was easier said than done, and was
complicated by differing social theories held by the British interveners.

The India Office types naturally thought that all truths about society and
state had already been revealed in Inja and that, therefore, one simply applied
those lessons and methods in the new place. Carry on – and wipe that grin off
your face! Other administrators, whose experience was in London or Cairo,
pursued different notions.

BRITISH 'INDIVIDUALISTS' IN IRAQ

Dodge marks out two main schools of thought among
the British officials in Iraq. The "individualist school," which had been around
for nearly a century, was utilitarian, Benthamite, and in some way the product
of serial incest between the India Office and the sell-out wing of English classical
liberalism. Their "individualism," if it must be called that, centered on rational
individual actors looking to maximize their economic good, very narrowly conceived.

Without bogging down in the matter, this outlook involved a subaltern clerk's
notion of rationality in a mechanistic universe subject to
statistical-mathematical analysis and manipulation. I shall merely note the
resemblance between this ideology and some contemporary American variants
associated with the Chicago School, which long served as the right wing of Cold
War liberalism. In opposing this scientistic, "empiricist" outlook, the Left
believes it has refuted the only possible defense of freedom and free markets;
and precisely because this outlook does not require much actual "freedom" for
real actors in real places, US officialdom increasingly embraces it.

Allied to this was the claim that under Oriental Despotism, no real property
existed (p. 51). It was thus up to the imperial power to specify "real" property
rights and impose them systematically, and if this happened to help some,
including fellow nationals of the imperial power, and depress others, that was
entirely accidental. The Ottoman state or the local tribe had held all property
titles, and it was for the Brits to impose a modernized system fit for a market
economy.

It is worth remarking in passing that it took some nerve for the Brits to do
this, given their inability fully to extract their own basic legal notions and
practices from the framework of Anglo-Norman feudalism.

BRITISH 'COLLECTIVISTS' IN IRAQ

The second school of administrative thought was
"collectivist." This was an ideology tailor-made for English gentlemen who enjoyed
power, wealth, and even commerce, but looked down from Olympian heights on mere
"trade." They were anti-urban, anti-bourgeois, prone to finding noble savages
to lionize and recruit overseas, and inclined to contrast the green and pleasant
south of England with the industrialized north.6

This was nothing new. Holders of this view had long since conquered,
pillaged, and organized Scotland and Ireland, enrolled the noble savages of
those places in the imperial armed forces, and kept those landscapes so green
and pleasant that the people had no livelihood and had to leave for North
America and other parts of the Great Frontier.

Why should what had worked so well in Scotland, Ireland, and India, not work
in Mesopotamia?

A PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS

The British official mind, sometimes Benthamite
and sometimes agrarian, went along by fits and starts, and was rather torn while
inventing Iraq. The British had enough accumulated experience administering
overseas "natives" to grasp the need for bureaucracy that could effectively
penetrate into the daily lives of the people so badly needing surveying and
punishing. It was one of their complaints that the corrupt Ottoman bureaucrats
had remained detached from Iraqi society (Dodge, p. 48). Ideally, the
new state would bring society fully into its care.

British practice, whatever the relative "individualism" or "collectivism" of
the particular policymakers, did involve the "high modernist" project of making
things bureaucratically intelligible, orderly, and manageable. Thus, the "model
of state-driven modernization that would transform property rights was exported
along with everything else that colonial modernization entailed" (p. 105).
Officials on the ground would rather perversely allocate, transfer, and award
property rights on the basis of any number of ad hoc notions and for
sundry instrumental purposes.

It took a good measure of state-imposed social engineering to create "natural
order" in Iraq.

ENGLISH COOKING AND THE IRAQI DOG'S DINNER

But the Brits were short on time and money and
had to scale down the creation in Iraq of an ideal modern, abstract, bureaucratic
state. Less would have to do, and the key - aside from keeping the king, his
councilors, and bureaucrats happy and in line - was to give the puppet state
sufficient force to compel obedience from the refractory urban masses and the
wild-eyed farmers and nomads out in the sticks. This proved difficult because
the noble savages, "the true Iraqis" according to one school of British thought,
were not too keen on being governed at all (pp. 48-49).

The Brits wanted and needed the oil. Iraq had to seem independent. State
building demanded enough centralized force to collect taxes so as to impose
order, so that more taxes could be collected, to impose order, and so on ad
infinitum. This is the essence of being modern, according to most schools of
thought.

The British now confronted the dilemma of how to build an army loyal to king
Faisal and his state, while keeping both subservient to Britain. Here was a real
dilemma. British forces could not remain indefinitely. Conscription was needed,
but the British administrators distrusted the urban masses – seen as malformed
by Ottoman corruption, unreliable owing to Arab nationalism, and physically poor
specimens owing to effete urban living (and here again is the agrarian
prejudice).

That left the tribal country folk. Unfortunately, these noble savages were
disinclined to be conscripted and were heavily armed.

The British undertook to find the proper sheiks – the natural leaders. Having
done that, they required them to remit current and overdue taxes as well as
their clansmen's rifles. They got some response on the first demand and next to
none on the second one.

At this point, technology was adduced to save the day: air power! The Royal
Air Force needed to justify its existence and quickly asserted that bombing was
a great way to achieve compliance on the cheap. Thus came into being taxation
by bombing – an intellectual breakthrough worthy of the civilization that
produced it. Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary, was a great promoter of this
policy and, indeed, never saw a bombing campaign he didn't like (although even
he later found US aerial conduct in Korea a bit excessive).

So the territories, property, and people under non-complying sheiks were
bombed and bombed, until the sheiks came in to negotiate. Typically, they
produced the money – and no rifles worth mentioning. Even sheiks acting as
conduits of British-Hashemite state power, found their limits (pp. 136,
144-156).

The policymakers sold this to the English public as a much more humane way of
doing things than sending in an army that the administrators didn't have.

Meanwhile, a rather small Iraqi army was cobbled together, but with air power
kept in reserve as the last, next to last, and very nearly next-to-last resort.
Things rocked along, and the British withdrew. Then World War II came, the
Americans eased the British out of their ill-gotten oil fields, bit by bit, and
thence by sundry twists and turns we arrive at the here and now.

ARE THERE LESSONS FOR THE YANKS?

Professor Dodge has been a very good guide so
far, and I suppose I could leave it at that. When someone has written an excellent
book, it may be rude to begrudge him his political views. But, alas, there hovers
over the book a notion that there exists, somewhere, some sort of ideal state
for Iraq, and that the Americans - if they are more patient than the British
were in the 1920s and '30s – can somehow bring that ideal state about. This
notion, which seems hopelessly muddled to me at least, becomes explicit in the
later chapters.

Dodge describes how the Ba'athist "shadow state" – which presumably was not
the proper, idealized state - exercised power and leverage against its citizens.
After the first US-Iraq War, "the civilian arm of the state employed 21 percent
of the working population, with 40 percent of Iraqi households directly
depending on government payments." Again: "Applications to receive a ration card
gave the government crucial information about every household under its control"
(p. 160). Persons from Saddam Hussein's "extended clan group" staffed the state
and their networks "protected Saddam by penetrating all corners of society."
This was not a proper state because "these informal and highly personalized
networks undermine the creation of a legal-rational bureaucracy and have a
flexibility and tenacity that make them very difficult to root out. Coalition
forces run the danger of unconsciously bolstering the networks of the shadow
state created by the regime they ousted" (p. 161).

But many of the same things could be said about any developed "western"
welfare-warfare state. And consider Dodge's characterization of how the regime
of Saddam Hussein acquired and kept power:

"[F]irst, the deployment of extreme levels organized violence by the state to
dominate and shape society; second, the use of state resources – jobs,
development aid, and patronage – to buy the loyalty of sections of society;
third, the use of oil revenue by the state to increase its autonomy from
society; and, finally, the exacerbation and re-creation by the state of communal
and ethnic divisions as a strategy of rule. These interlinked problems have
fuelled the state's domestic illegitimacy; its tendency to embark on military
adventurism beyond its own borders, and even the Baathist regime's drive to
acquire weapons of mass destruction. Seen this perspective, Saddam Hussein must
be understood less as the cause of Iraq's violent political culture – or even of
Iraq's role as a source of regional instability – and more as the symptom,
albeit an extremely consequential one, of deeper, long-term dynamics within
Iraq's political sociology" (pp.169-170).

But let us rewrite the passage a bit to fit another state. Now we have:

"… deployment of extreme levels organized violence by the state to dominate
and shape society (especially in 1861-1865 and 1917-1919); second, the
use of state resources – jobs, development aid, and patronage – to buy the loyalty
of sections of society; third, the use of monetary levers (and other tools)
by the state to increase its autonomy from society; and, finally, the exacerbation
and re-creation by the state of communal and ethnic divisions as a strategy
of rule (even if these are undertaken in the name of egalitarianism).
These interlinked problems have fuelled the state's domestic illegitimacy; its
tendency to embark on military adventurism beyond its own borders, and even
the regime's highly successful drive to acquire (and use) weapons of
mass destruction. Seen this perspective, G----- B--- must be understood
less as the cause of X's violent political culture – or even of X's
role as a source of worldwide instability – and more as the symptom, albeit
an extremely consequential one, of deeper, long-term dynamics within X's
political sociology."

The point is simply that there may be no ideal good state that
differs, fundamentally, from a bad state. The things that make either one a
state appear to be the same. It is simply not obvious that giving the Iraqi
people a modern state would be such a big favor. Nor is it obvious that
it can be done at all, especially if one has to rely on the Americans' being
more patient than the British were.

Americans are not known for patience.

In any case, it is hard to see how successfully imposing a modern state,
anywhere, could be done without resort to essentially criminal means.
Established states resort to fairly small amounts of internal violence
precisely because they already killed, burned, and pillaged enough to make their
point one or two centuries ago. This is what is called "legitimacy."

To take this any further would require a long excursion into history,
political theory, and ethics.

Meanwhile, the current US project in Iraq seems to be running up against the
same self-inflicted imperial paradox noted by Gertrude Bell in 1921:

"We are hampered by the tribal uprising which has delayed the work of handing
over to the Arab Govt. Sir Percy, I think rightly, decided that the tribes must
be made to submit to force. In no other way was it possible to make them surrender
their arms, or teach them that you mustn't engage lightly in revolution, even
when your holy men tell you to do so… without the lesson and without drawing
their teeth by fines of arms (impossible to obtain except by force) we should
have left an impossible task to the Arab Govt. Nevertheless, it's difficult
to be burning villages at one end of the country by means of a British Army,
and assuring people at the other end that we really have handed over responsibility
to native ministers…."7

Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian
publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason,
the Journal of
Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist
Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on America's wars.
He was recently named the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at
the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
His column, "The Old Cause," appears alternating Fridays on
Antiwar.com.

Reproduction of material from any original Antiwar.com pages
without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2003 Antiwar.com